33. Cuts Like a Knife

33

Cuts Like a Knife

Dreams. So very many of them.

Warrick dreamed of his father, the big, laughing man, long hair pulled back in a queue, chasing him round the dining room, exclaiming that pranky little boys who played tricks on the cook shouldn’t be allowed to giggle so much... Remembering Mama’s face when she bit into the stew, seasoned with sugar. Not salt.

He dreamed of his mother, stern-faced yet eyes twinkling with love—and glistening from the tears she refused to let fall—ordering him to return safely and posthaste when he announced his intention to join the dragoons alongside his two closest friends, Ed and Frost.

He dreamed of a feisty governess who didn’t moderate her words when they spoke in a frozen garden. A shadowed nook. An empty ballroom. Nor anywhere else. He dreamed of her sun-blazed hair, her saucy wit, of tasting her breasts…

He dreamed of King and Knight, growing strong and tall, growing muscles and confidence and arguing over the merits of Oxford versus Cambridge.

He dreamed of Sophia, a mischievous prankster herself, and her antics entertaining their maid, their cook, the stable boy they no longer had...

He dreamed of Julia. Sweet, silent Julia who would let him hold her, but who still wouldn’t speak.

He awoke on fire. His entire body blazing with heat.

He woke with watering eyes, the moisture beneath dashed aside with a rough swipe of his finger because the knife tearing through his back commanded every ounce of his control.

“Prim? Some-something’s happening.”

Sleep-fogged, her every limb weighted, head heavy and thoughts sluggish, Aphrodite dozed on.

“Aphrodi-teeee!”

It took the aching whisper of her name to yank her awake.

She pried open eyelids, blinked into darkness. Richard. Bed. No longer holding her, but thrashing?—

At the jagged note in his voice, the restless buckle of his body, she burst into sitting. “What is it?”

“Knife. Back. That or flame. Cut-cutting me. From the inside.”

She was up in a moment, lighting the lamp and scurrying around the bed. The whining dog, already on his feet, jumped down at her approach. “Shhh. Not now, Merc. Settle.”

She rolled Richard onto his stomach and brought the light close to his back.

A fine sheen of perspiration covered every inch. She couldn’t see much beyond the ragged, torn flaps of skin that greeted her, the area worse than before, the redness deeper and swelling more inflamed. She laid her fingers alongside the gash and felt the muscles twitching, jumping against her light touch. Confirming the confusing blur. “Hold on. Bite the sheet if you need to. Don’t let your teeth break.”

“Good God, Prim.” A harsh chuckle. “I’m in pain, not a sniveling weakling.”

“I know, I know… Give me but a moment. You have the right of it—something is happening, though I don’t know what. It’s as though your muscles riot.”

With Mercury having lost interest and wandered away, she placed the lamp on the floor and shut the door. Returned to place both hands, fingers barely connecting with his quivering skin, over the fresh wound. Smoothing her flattened fingers outward, she observed, “Your muscles. They move chaotically. Like a spasm…but not.”

As she watched, the convulsions strengthened, rippling through him, arching his hips off the bed before dropping them back down. He moaned against the bedding. No idea whether he bit down or not. “It cannot last,” she told them both, as panic amplified. “Not at this intensity.”

Another two forceful contractions that buckled his body. “Have you—” Then she saw something that made her squeal. “Have you tweezers?”

Another moan, then he lifted his head, spat out the sheet. “Certainly. Let me reach into my pocket and pull them out for you. Hell no, I don’t carry tweezers on my person.” A pause when his body convulsed again. “Not my house.”

“Right. ’Tis Uncle’s. One second…”

“Don’t leave,” he protested when her weight lifted off the mattress.

“I’ll be but an instant.” She ran from the room, knowing exactly where her uncle stored his supplies—where they had cleaned and sorted many of them so recently. She came back carrying gauze and cotton; a wrung-out, not quite drenched cloth to rinse the sweat; clean towel to dry him; and a small pair of steel forceps.

For she had seen a tiny gleam poking out from his skin; had felt the sharp edge when she dared tap it with one finger. That was not skin, nor rock, and it had definitely not been there before.

Aphrodite worried. He perspired more every moment, even a long while later. Breathed out in exhales so harsh, she could only imagine how great his pain. All through gaining his feet outside and helping him traverse over the stone wall and then return indoors, she’d held out hope that the injury wasn’t dire.

But now?

What if she wasn’t enough, if together they could not?—

“I must marry an heiress.” His startling pronouncement halted her fingers as she waited for the gleam to reappear. Heart thumping painfully, both at the way his body would start to expel the…thing, and then how it would sink back into his skin, into oblivion.

“You must marry an heiress,” she repeated dully. Why would he state such a blunt, uncourted fact? Something they already acknowledged, knew with certainty between them. The lout!

And after you have shared a bed for an hour or two!

She blinked away from the terrifying, stomach-unsettling sight of his sweating, shuddering back— because you cannot blink away the hurt from his words? Painful determination had her fixing her gaze upon the clean forceps—not yet used. “And you tell me this…why?”

“It seemed vital.”

Vital? “For you?”

He shuffled his arms, as though restless, and came up on his elbows, tangling the bedclothes around one hand. “For you.”

Splat.

The wet washing cloth landed cold upon the fire blazing within Warrick’s back.

She huffed off the bed and to her feet. Despite the dripping chill, his back burned with the heat of her glare. “As I have not expressed any desire to marry—much less marry you —I see not why ’tis appropriate to utter such.”

Despite the effort, the pain, he rolled over to his side, dislodging the icy cloth.

Only to face the pain in her gaze.

Despite her claim, his statement was founded. Was necessary. “A reminder. To us both. For if I had a choice, I believe I would put forth the effort to make you express such desire.”

Her eyes heated with the passion shared between them earlier, a bright beam that doused the anger. “You would have me claim a desire to marry you?”

With all the anguish his sore body and tired mind could muster, he spat the words her direction. “I would have you claim any desire at all, were it toward any part of me.”

Fighting his muscles, his prescribed future, he wrenched to his stomach, flinching at the wet cloth now freezing his middle and soaking through to the bedclothes. “Be gone with you. Out. Upstairs. Or, sick body or not I might try to claim that which I have no right to and make you mine—wretched, wilted penis or not.”

And wasn’t that a lie? The wilted part. For the remembered hardness of his prick reached his tormented awareness even now. His healing body mocking him.

Mocking his reckless, irrational desires.

The ones that made him yearn for a forthright governess with no money but more sense than he could ever possess.

Because every moment spent with her, with every day they played at house, he wanted a hundred, a thousand more.

Another tremor ripped through his muscles, taunting forth a scream he refused to utter. Abandoning any pretense of conversation, he shoved his face toward the mattress again. Damn desires.

He wanted forever. And he needed it with her.

If only he lived through the night…

“I still cannot countenance that some… thing is coming out of your body.”

Warrick knew not how long it had been. Her soothing voice had lulled him to slumber—that or the wretched, unrelenting buck of bone and sinew, his rebellious body having a mind of its own.

His mind? Drifting beyond these walls more than remaining firmly within. But he heard her now, heard her whispered gasp. “It…defies…everything…”

The dismay in her tone, the worry conveyed as well, surfaced him from the depths.

To find his face squashed into the mattress. He turned his head to the side and responded, despite the Herculean effort it took. “One of the physicians, after we made it back to England…” A swallow against the pain and he continued. “Not the field hack that wanted to leave me for dead but another, told me he hadn’t removed everything. ’Twas more risk than…boon to…do so.”

As he faltered toward the end, her palm met his exposed cheek. Fingers brushed down the side of his neck, swept back sweat-dampened hair from the side of his face until coming to rest upon his shoulder.

Where he needed her to stay. To keep touching him. Providing such a marvelous distraction. Focusing on those fingers—hers, on the bare skin of his body—strengthened his voice. “Claimed he had seen pieces of shot appear weeks or months after battle. But no one mentioned years.”

“Well, something jarred it loose.”

“Loose? Doesn’t feel anything of the sort.”

“Something happened to cause this.” Her fingers flexed over his burning skin.

“Right. One of those dastard falls. My arse meeting the ground… What? Three times since you arrived.”

“ Me? So ’tis all my fault?” The gentle chide in her voice was obvious. “You suffer now because of my presence here?”

“Nay.” His salvation, more like.

She took him away from his body, his long-standing troubles, his non-standing legs. “You free me.”

Her hand abandoned his shoulder, returned to the inflamed area low on his back. The one that still seared like a brand. “I would like to free this stubborn, blighted piece of…”

Curse away , he wanted to encourage.

White light blazed across his eyes. Even with them closed. But no troop of angels swept down to carry him off this time.

They did not need to.

For he had his own personal, swearing angel caring for him through the night. Watching his back—on so many levels.

That comforting thought uppermost in mind, he lost the battle to remain awake as the next clash of pain took him under.

Later, disturbingly, agonizingly later, Aphrodite suspected the worst had passed.

Richard’s breathing had calmed though he still felt entirely too flushed to her. But the copious sweating had subsided. Or mayhap she only convinced herself of that given how frequently she blotted his skin with the towel.

Overriding his weak protests, she pushed a tumbler of gin against his lips and made him drink. Aye, she’d known where Uncle kept those sorts of supplies too, and from what she’d seen, Richard needed the oblivion of sleep. Healing sleep, she hoped.

After the gut-churning chore of assisting the metal sliver in its exit during the harrowing while that Richard’s mind tranced, she refilled the tumbler, likely higher than she ought, and drank it down herself before cleansing the area and trimming the torn skin surrounding it in preparation of applying a sticking plaster.

Now that she no longer explained her every action and sight to him, given his slumberous state, she no longer forestalled her astonished gaze from glancing over at the blackened shard his body had expelled.

Not quite half an inch long, only a sliver thick yet sharp as a blade, the curved fragment loomed like a spectre of death. This had been in his body since Albuera? That was over thirty months ago. She couldn’t imagine.

Well yes, she could, after the last anguishing hour.

The tumble off the stone wall and into the rock had seen fit to jar this loose?

Were there others? She could only pray not.

Early the following morning, her patient finally slack with restorative sleep, when Aphrodite opened the kitchen door to go out with Mercury, a startling surprisal awaited.

For not only had a thick snowfall blanketed them during the night, pushed up close to the cottage, a monstrously large delivery blocked her path.

With more than a bit of trepidation, she lifted the oilskin tarp, covered in an inch or more of snow, to discover Richard’s Merlin’s chair.

She assumed it was his, for it was not the same one she’d seen him use two Christmases prior, but it could belong to no one else.

Richard’s missing chair.

Returned under the cover of night, the snow concealing any evidence of footprints: theirs from the moonlit kiss folly and fall and those of the perplexing pixies who, it appeared, possessed an affinity for ambulatory chairs and frolics of their own.

Even more of a marvel, was the second tarp beside it, keeping a copious amount of logs, split and readied, dry and within easy reach. Oh my.

“There now. It still looks heinous, but the bleeding has stopped.” Prim probed about and he let her.

She had bustled in as soon as he’d stirred, brandishing more wet rags and drying cloths, and ordering him to use the chamber pot, wash and she’d be back with plaster in hand. She’d also mentioned about washing his hair in the kitchen after he roused fully. What a stirring promise, that.

“It’s only seeping a bit. Shouldn’t come through the bandage if you want to rise”—ahem—“and dress. As long as we can keep you from a fevered infection, I think you go down the right path.”

Warrick wasn’t sure he agreed. Felt as though his body had been the turf for a dozen horse races. Everything hurt. Even his eyelashes.

“Please forgive me,” he told her, once she finished her inspection and he rose from his prone position on the mattress into sitting, “practically whined like a baby last eve.” He made no mention of the other conversation. The other thoughts that made him want to cry like a babe. Had he really—stupidly—attempted to shove her away? To deny the feelings that kept burgeoning between them?

Slapped his need of a bloody heiress in her caring face?

She rounded on him. “You did not whine. You did not complain. Thank heavens that is gone from your flesh. Not another word.” She swooped past the fingers he coiled into a fist to keep from drawing her closer, swept the bandaging supplies up and left with the direction, “Attire yourself and I shall see you in the kitchen to break your fast.”

She shut his door with a snap, but not before flashing him the secretive, seductive smile flitting about her lips. Likely berating him in silence, given how it was approaching if not past noon.

Managing Prim. How he adored her.

Once washed and clothed, leaning heavily against the wall, his ill-used muscles trembly, he opened the door.

To be greeted by wonderment.

Aphrodite had busied herself, breathless, anticipating his arrival.

Hearing the slight creak of turning wheels, alerting to his approach, she put the chopping knife on the counter next to the ambitious pile of sliced carrots and spun, waiting for his entrance.

The second he met her gaze, the bottom of one palm hit the arm of his rolling chair. “Where, Prim? Where in the world…?”

She pointed. “Right out there, beneath an oilskin and next to a copious stack of dry, split wood.”

His bewilderment grew. “You are bamming me.”

“God’s truth.”

He stared at her. “Did I ever tell you I have angels?”

Beyond his muttering last night? She thought back to their encounter long ago in a frozen garden. “You might have mentioned such, but never explained.”

His teeth sunk into both lips before he released them on a sigh. His hair really was longer than it ought to be. Was lank at the moment, flattened from the hours of sweat and toil he’d endured. After she fed him, she couldn’t wait to wash it.

How considerate of you. How very… Not prim. To give yourself a chance to stroke your fingers through his hair, washing and rinsing? And I wager you shall offer to comb it through once finished? Continue the effort until it’s dry?

She would. And savor every second.

Oh, how her heart was going to ache once they parted. How the empty nights loomed?—

“Angels,” she prompted, pulling herself from the notion of future pain. Time enough for that later. When he wasn’t within reach. “Yours?”

“A legion,” he admitted, more serious than she could remember seeing him. “Thought to take me off in Spain. Rattled as much to Frost. Not sure he heard me.”

She swallowed against the notion of him dying there—on the battlefield. “I am heartened they did not. Take you from us, that is.”

Still staring at her, still more solemn than she was used to, he said, “As am I.”

More disordered than she could admit, needing to touch him so fiercely she ached with it, she approached where he had brought the ambulatory chair to a halt. “May I?”

He nodded.

She braced one arm on his shoulder and the other above his knee, and knelt before him. With a light touch, she reached for one thigh. Then lifted her hand away. “Close your eyes.”

He did so without protest.

She put two fingers upon his thigh about three inches apart. “Do you feel anything?”

“I do.” He blinked his eyes open and smiled when he saw her hand on his leg.

“Tsk. Keep them closed.”

“Yes, milady.”

“ Pfft. ” She lifted her hand and took her index finger and ran it up from his knee toward his groin.

“That I feel.” He whistled, gave her a slitted-eye, heavy look, his attention focused on her face. “Atop the bruised hash is your light and wickedly wandering attention, I do believe.”

“No peeking, now,” she ordered through the answering smile she could not dim. Withdrawing her hand from where, admittedly, it wanted to wander farther, she kept her motions silent and touched his opposite leg.

“Yes,” he hissed—in wonder? “Left leg now. Ankle. Top of right thigh—again, Prim? Naughtier than I’d expected. Left…calf? Or is that the dog?”

“Open your eyes.” When he did, the first thing he sought out was Mercury—still curled up across the room. His gaze found hers again, pleased, she thought, but not in alt. Not expressing any supreme surprise, which caused disappointment to tighten her chest.

Had you expected a miracle?

Mayhap not, but she had wished for one. For him , for Richard’s sake.

“Is that any more or less than what you have felt previously? With Uncle or on your own?”

His hands, which had been resting, open, on the outside of each leg just above his bent knees, flexed, then fisted. “In all honesty, I would say about the same as the last two or so months.”

“Why then, if this is no different than recent weeks, did you start to appear so elated?”

“Aphrodite.” The deep syllables of her name rolling over her brought tingles in their wake. “Think, woman. Where were your hands just now? Why would that not delight me?”

Familiar heat flushed her cheeks. She granted him a delighted smile of her own, rising to her feet. “Be that as it may, perhaps we should not expect anything different so soon? The swelling no doubt still needs to recede. Landing upon that rock may have done the favor of freeing that wicked piece, but it certainly didn’t do your back any good. I will need to check the wrappings later before?—”

“You do, though. You do me very good.”

“Thank you for that.”

“Truth told, tu me imprimis in profundis entis meae .”

She impressed him down to the depths of his soul?

Oh my. “Richard.”

That’s all she could manage in that moment. His name. The sound of it aching with every bit of caring and longing from her depths.

“I mean it, Aphrodite. Every ounce of you is beautiful and competent and much, much more amiable than surly Arbuckle. Are you certain you are related? Other than eye color, I see no resemblance at all. Well, that”—he gave her a smile full of confidence, mayhap even pride—“and how you could be a physician yourself.”

“ Pfft. As if women could do such a thing.”

“ You could.”

Unused to such praise, she took one step away. “Thank you for that, but no. I am too content with my job as governess.”

“‘Content’? Not in alt? Not thrilled to your lovely toes?”

“Lovely?” Not used to being under discussion, her toes stretched in her slippers, dug in to the solid floor beneath. “You will embarrass them. For all you know, they sprout warts and hairs.”

“Ah. Troll toes, then? Worry not. Mine are much the same.” She knew they weren’t. Had seen his toes— and every other part of him too, lest you forget! “Will you? Can…you?” His brow furrowed, but the crooked smile boded for outlandish. “May you, please?”

“Will I, can I, may I… What? You are one perplexing fellow.”

“May I entice you to sit upon my lap?” Hands now wide, on either side of his wheeled chair, he wiggled his fingers toward his groin—then wiggled his eyebrows as well.

She couldn’t help it. She came closer, bent and kissed his cheek. Leaned over and kissed the other, then placed one hand upon the back of his neck, her thumb delving up through the long strands while her fingers took note of the temperature of his skin. Finally, no longer fiery. “You wicked, wicked fellow. There will be no lap sitting today. Ask me again in a week.”

It wasn’t until after she picked up the knife again that he said, “A week, hmm? If I can tolerate you for that long.”

He caught the uncooked carrot that sailed toward his nose. The smile on his lips devilishly inviting indeed.